Tribu Fuerte: from a whiteboard on the wall to an app in every pocket

The starting point

Four lifts, four columns: hip hinge, squat, push and pull. Members wrote their best weight, reps and date on the whiteboard by hand. It worked as long as you were standing in front of the wall: nobody could follow their progress over time, compare fairly with someone heavier or lighter, or find out that a training partner had just broken a record.

What I built

An app that installs on any phone, in Spanish, designed around the way the gym already worked:

• Records for the four lifts. Each one becomes a post on the gym’s feed, where the others can congratulate and comment.
• A leaderboard for every lift, current or all-time, scored on estimated one-rep max divided by bodyweight: a lighter member can beat a heavier one.
• A personal profile with a strength chart, trophies, statistics and a progress graph for every lift.
• Group chats created by Moisés, public or private, with reactions and a mute switch for each chat.
• Notifications in the app and as push notifications, even with the app closed: congratulations, comments, new messages, someone overtaking you on the leaderboard. Each member chooses what to receive.
• Members sign up and wait for Moisés to approve them, so only people from the gym get in.

How it went

The first working version was online the same evening. Then I refined it with Moisés, one round of feedback at a time, until it was a complete product: its own domain, an app that installs from the browser without going through an app store, and a presentation guide with a short video to introduce it to his members.

Moisés didn’t have to coordinate a designer and a developer. He talked to one person, and he still does: the app runs on a server I manage.